Establishing Effective Corporate Governance: Lead Independent External Director’s Message in SoftBank Corp. Integrated Report 2024

The English edition of SoftBank Corp.’s (TOKYO: 9434) Integrated Report for 2024, published on October 31, 2024, is a comprehensive report that not only covers SoftBank’s financial information for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024 (FY2023), but also outlines SoftBank’s medium- to long-term growth strategies, ESG strategy, and more.

Establishing effective corporate governance is essential to enhancing corporate value in a sustainable manner. SoftBank further strengthened its corporate governance in June 2024 by appointing independent external directors, thereby making external directors the majority of SoftBank’s Board of Directors. In the report, Atsushi Horiba, SoftBank’s Lead Independent External Director, and Chairman, Representative Director & Group CEO of HORIBA, Ltd., discusses the thinking behind these appointments, as well as matters related to risk management and human rights. Below is an excerpt.

Message from Lead Independent External Director

Promoting reforms of the Board of Directors in both form and substance

To achieve a stable corporate government system it is necessary to avoid losing all of your external directors at once, so the interval at which external directors are replaced is an important point. And with regard to the selection of external directors, I believe it is important not only to focus on reinforcing skills not found within the Company, but also to select those who can express their opinions as an advisor with a third-party perspective based on their area of expertise and experience, thereby broadening the perspective of the entire Board of Directors.

Furthermore, with regard to governance, recognizing that there are concerns about the listing of the parent company and its subsidiary in particular, we have been expressing our opinions at meetings of the Board of Directors and committees from the perspective of avoiding any suspicion of a conflict of interest. Going forward, as SoftBank builds the next-generation of social infrastructure to support a digital society, our social responsibilities will become even greater. For that reason, I think it is important to go back to the basics of governance by ensuring that each and every employee has a strong awareness of the responsibilities.

Horiba’s entire message can be found here, on page 62. Page 63 features messages from newly appointed independent external directors, Maki Sakamoto and Hiroko Sasaki.

SoftBank Integrated Report 2024

Every year, SoftBank publishes an Integrated Report, a comprehensive document that includes information on its vision, medium- to long-term growth strategies, value creation processes, materiality, and financial and non-financial information.

Integrated Reports

(Posted on November 25, 2024, Original Article Published on October 10, 2024)
by SoftBank News Editors